The spirit lives on: Glenferrie oval

The Hawthorn Football Club has gone back to its roots in Glenferrie this season to honour its centenary. The club, in collaboration with the Patient Wolf Distilling Company, released a centenary gin featuring native Yellow Box Eucalyptus growing around the club’s spiritual home of Glenferrie Oval.

My father, a lifetime Hawthorn supporter and teetotaller, told me he wanted a bottle of this gin for the mantlepiece.

I laughed, ‘But Dad, you don’t drink, and you don’t have a fireplace’…

Such is the lure of well-crafted marketing and lifelong football club devotion. To be honest, I was also completely sold on the idea. Mix me a drink blended with the idea of history, a splash of lemon (a favourite), garnished with a eucalyptus leaf, and it will only take a couple of drinks to turbocharge from nostalgia into a spiritual connection no matter how abstract.

Can you bottle a place?

Patient Wolf Distilling Company describes gin as ‘a distilled spirit that derives its predominant flavour from juniper berries … However, brands will diversify their gin by adding … modern and traditional botanicals.’ [1]

The characteristics of wine are a result of its terroir, capturing notes from soil, topography, climate and other key influences essentially providing a sense of place. I suppose gin offers the next best option to capture the story of a place in the absence of a vineyard. Gin’s portability means you can create the idea of a place using local botanicals.

The distillery noted native Yellow Box Eucalyptus (Eucalyptus melliodora) grows naturally around the club’s spiritual home and this has been infused in its limited-edition centenary gin. The Yellow Box, also known as honey box or yellow ironbark, is a eucalyptus tree endemic to southeastern Australia with a honey scented pale-yellow blossom.

Patient Wolf Distilling Co brochure for Hawthorn Football Club’s Centenary Gin

How do you evoke the spirit of a place?

The distinctive scent of eucalyptus has long captured the imagination of Australians. Artist, Sidney Nolan, seeking to entice Australian expatriates, George Johnston and Charmian Clift back to the homelands in 1963, burnt eucalyptus leaves on a visit to Hydra in Greece. Both expats referred to this scented time travel in their writing.

Johnston wrote in Clean Straw for Nothing, ‘… the moment the aromatic pungency of the burning leaves stuck his nostrils he experienced for an instant a real pang of hunger for something experienced and lost far back in time….’ and Clift in an essay, ‘After the Hodmadods’, mentioned ‘… he put  a match to them and burned them and held them under our noses and I was ready to cry with longing for the spiky wild strange grey bush tunnelled with harshness and silence’.[2]

It is easy to connect the smell of burning eucalyptus to a dormant homesickness, a longing for a place. However, it is clear from the writers’ own words, the scent stoked deep and buried stories articulating their long lost connection to place.

Going back to the spiritual home

My great grandparents, John Sheehy Meagher and Catherine Sophia Carden, chose Hawthorn in 1893 as the place to bring up their family. I’ve written previously about the Meagher’s ancestral home up the road from Glenferrie oval here. Their youngest son, my grandfather, Jack, born in Hawthorn in 1905 stayed in Hawthorn all his life before he, his wife Dorothy (Dot) and their four children moved to Balwyn in 1952 when he was 47. Given he lived until 100, his time in Balwyn was marginally longer than Hawthorn, but the ties to Hawthorn remained strong.

When Jack was 98 years old, I interviewed him over several sessions trying to collect some family stories. I asked him how he met my grandmother, Dot. He said,

‘I met her in the middle of the Hawthorn football ground. We’re going for a walk one Friday night, … lots of people walked down the streets and walking around and around the football ground and, I ran into she and her brother.’

It was 1933 and Jack was 28 years old when he met the kid sister of his friend, Dan Donovan. Dot was 18 years old. The Donovan family lived in Elphin Grove, Hawthorn, having previously resided in Robinsons Road, Hawthorn. Dot’s eldest brother, Henry (Roy) Donovan played nine senior games over two years for the Hawthorn Football Club. My father told me many times his uncle played for Hawthorn, but perhaps even he didn’t realise his uncle Roy played in Hawthorn’s inaugural league team in 1925. It is this point, the commencement in league football, that the centenary gin seeks to mark. The club’s origins date back to 1873, whereas the Club’s official chronology on their website starts in 1902.[3] Our family’s involvement in the club begins with Roy’s playing career, there were also reports in 1934 that Dan Donovan was a promising recruit. There is plenty of evidence in the family archives of an early love for the game including this family favourite portrait of Jack as a wee tacker.

Young Jack Meagher with a leather football c.1910

The Yellow Box gum trees around Glenferrie oval today are too young to be witness trees, that is, trees celebrated for having witnessed history. The meet cute of my grandparents is not considered noteworthy in the history of Hawthorn – however, it was an important event for the Meagher and Donovan families and had some benefits for Hawthorn Football Club too!

The Family Club

Jack and Dot married at the Immaculate Conception Church in January 1940 seven years after they first met at Glenferrie oval. They had four children, and through them, have generated a legacy of fourteen grandchildren and thirty-one great grandchildren. Not all barrack for Hawthorn, but those that do, hold memberships living up to the former club motto installed in 1982, ‘The Family Club’.

The Latin motto adopted in 1966 predating ‘The Family Club’, ‘Spectemur Agendo’ loosely translated as ‘Let us be judged by our actions’, [4] coincided with the commencement of Jack and Dot’s youngest son, the late Des Meagher, as Hawthorn’s rangy left footed wingman (1966-1976). He played 198 games including the 1971 premiership game against St Kilda. Des went on to be assistant coach to Allan Jeans and Alan Joyce, coaching the reserves for 14 years, ‘leading them to seven straight finals series from 1982-88’[5] including a premiership in 1985 during Hawthorn’s Golden Years before retiring from professional coaching in 1993.

‘Des Meagher gets his kick away in a match against Carlton’. The Hard Way

I asked my father what Glenferrie oval means to him. He recalled going there as a schoolboy twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays to watch the players train, descending on the ground afterwards to kick the footy with friends. He’d return to the ground on a Saturday to watch the game and hang out with mates in the wooden grandstand whilst his father would sit with his uncle Wilbur in the art deco moderne grandstand, known then as the Red Brick stand and today as the Michael Tuck Stand.  As an adult, my father saw the first six games Des played in 1966 before departing overseas on 16 May. He met up with Des the following year when Des played in Ireland, the true Meagher/Donovan ancestral home. I’ll be publishing stories on the ancestral homeplace in more detail soon, including the inaugural international game of Australian rules at Dublin’s Croke Park.

‘Glenferrie oval bursting at the seams in the 1950s.’ The Hard Way

Centenary legacies

Delving into these intersecting histories between my family and the Hawthorn Football Club, it would seem especially for my father (and presumably many others) that more time was spent at Glenferrie oval than the official spiritual home, the local church. Early photos of Glenferrie show the oval as rather barren, but it was the spire of the Immaculate Conception Church that stood out on the eastern boundary, flanked by Grace Park on the western side with established plantings and avenues of trees.

Unfurling the 1971 pennant at Glenferrie Oval, 1 April 1972

Glenferrie oval is the undisputed home of the Hawthorn Football Club despite the club’s absence of over fifty years. It is natural to seek out tangible places to anchor memories. The hallowed grounds of Glenferrie oval loom large in the memory of many people like my father and my generation, although not so much for the youngest of our family’s brood.

However, it is the stories and memories that evoke the spirit of the place. This is the experience of connection that the centenary gin seeks to emulate. For my family, it’s the stories of their ancestors’ connections to the inaugural team of Hawthorn, the meet cute of Jack and Dot, my father’s generation’s faithful attendance to Hawthorn’s training and competition games, Des’ stellar playing and coaching career that evoke the spirit of Glenferrie oval. New memories are already in the making, my cousin’s daughter was selected as 2021 NAB Auskicker of the Year who is keen to play for the AFLW Hawks when she grows up.

The Patient Wolf Distilling Co centenary gin advertising noted, ‘to be enjoyed now or savoured for the future’ which has me thinking about whether I should save the gin for the future centenary of Jack and Dot’s meet cute in 2033, our very reason for being, or should we enjoy now to celebrate Roy’s games 100 years ago or four generations of Hawthorn devotion? It feels like a gathering at Glenferrie oval is calling. In any case the gin won’t last, but the stories will.

Endnotes

[1] Patient Wolf website

[2] Paul Genoni & Tanya Dalziell, ‘Taking the flowery bed back to Australia’: The repatriation of Charmian Clift and George Johnston, Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3 June 2016.

[3] Harry Gordon, The Hard Way, Lester-Townsend Publishing, 1990, p. 9; Hawthorn Football Club Chronology on website

[4] Peter Haby, ‘Spectemur Agendo, Garry Young’ in Hawthorn Football Club News, 5 September 2018 [online]

[5] ABC News 9 March 2011 [online]

Image Sources

Patient Wolf Distillery Co advertisement, Meagher family archive

‘Des Meagher gets his kick away from  …’ image from The Hard Way, Lester-Townsend Publishing, 1990, p.165

‘Glenferrie Oval bursting from the seams …’ image from The Hard Way, Lester-Townsend Publishing, 1990, p.71

Jack Meagher with football, c.1910, Meagher family archive

Unfurling the 1971 pennant at Glenferrie oval, 1 April 1972. image from Peter Haby et al., Kennedy’s Commandos: The Story of the ’71 Hawks, Hawks Museum, 2021, p.92.